Looking Ahead

I just sat through a presentation about the four big trends in IT that even the polite struggle to describe as dull, but it did get me thinking. Incumbent technology vendors (pretty much like incumbents everywhere) have too much invested in the present and will hence sell incremental as disruptive. IBM once believed sincerely in the future of mainframes, big studios still insist on the glorious road ahead for DVDs now that the laser is blue, predicting the future is always fraught with problems.

Armchair sniping is all well and good, but shouldn't I be in a position to predict better? Time to get my somewhat ample behind off the couch then, and stick my neck into the future. Here, I go - my four predictions for IT trends, at least as far as careful, conservative corporates are concerned.

Cloud will vaporise IT

Today's businesses are all concerned about the technology underlying the cloud, and how to adopt it. However, cloud isn't really a technology - its a method of delivery of computing power. Cheap, reliable, ubiquitous - thats the key. Unit costs must be very low, it should work without issue all the time, and it must be everywhere. These three words are key to the revolution. It happened in electric power, in telephone, in data connections, its now happening to computing power and storage.

A large part of the IT's attention today is on building and tuning infrastructure - server farms, storage arrays, firewalls and networks. This is going to vaporise. Think of what will go away - buying stuff like servers, storage, backup, devices, administering the stuff you bought, managing security, disaster recovery - something like 75% of the typical IT department's activities. We used to have fourteen email servers, a storage network, a spam server, antivirus, firewall, backups, local mail routing servers, three administrators, backup schedules, recovery plans - all vaporized when we moved to cloud email at a single fee per mailbox.

Startups are already tapping this on a large scale. Most own no servers - a credit card and a few taps of the keyboard will get you services like Heroku for computing, Amazon cloud for storage, Google for email, Salesforce for CRM, Zendesk for helpdesk and public internet connections. Each will scale and perform far beyond most corporate IT systems. These and similar services; you buy them like furniture - designed, assembled and ready to use, sturdy and reliable, to be arranged as needed. Much of a company's IT is a support service that is neither strategic nor related to the firm's core competence; ripe for the vanishing act.

Your clueless desktop support person and underpaid genius of a CIO will remain, though.

The Berlin Wall will fall

There was a time not so long ago when work and home life were clearly divided. You may have spent long hours at work, even brought work home sometimes, but it was nevertheless clearly separate from the activities of home. That line between work and home is no longer visible. People work in thin slices, between bites of dinner or commercial breaks on TV, while crossing the road or running a marathon. Work and play are not distinct buckets, they're slices of attention in a continuum. The devices have also merged - facebook and work email, spreadsheets and angry birds, videos and Word documents all coexist on the same boat.

This is not a prediction - this has already happened. The consequence is the prediction.

As long as work and home were separate buckets, companies had the luxury of control. The work bucket was the company's to control as seen fit. You could specify attendance, hours, measure productivity, analyse behavior and the CIO could bully you into using a boring black brick of a laptop if that's what the standard was. Today,CIOs are pulling their bald heads hairless over BYOD concerns but its not just a device issue. Users are increasingly impatient of boundaries between services erected only to make corporate IT's job easier. People are interacting with business associates everywhere - not just on channels approved by IT. Put all the controls you like - the conversation will merely move entirely, maybe onto the Facebook or Yahoo Chat. Corporate IT, long the dictator in a private republic, is being forced to change this mindset and adapt to a lack of walls. Some have already done it, many many more are reluctantly following.

Big is going to get bigger

Data will grow explosively – that's hardly a prediction worth making. I do, however, think that the nature of data that corporates store, and how they store it, will change dramatically.

The data that companies store has been growing over the years (I've seen it roughly double every year in the last decade) but I predict we are in for much faster growth in the next decade, maybe as much as tenfold every year. However, both what we store and how we store it is in for a big shakeup.

First the question of what we store. The focus used to be transactional and analytical data, and this grew as prices became cheaper because many of the compromises made earlier to pack things tight were no longer required. However, there is a limit to how much of this kind of data a company generates; after a while this grows only as fast as company operations do. What really causes the explosion is the new predilection to store historical data – to never purge anything. GMail started by encouraging us never to delete email, and we are now in the digital hoarding generation. Every file, every database transaction, every log - companies now want to store everything for ever.

Storage will thus have to go in the opposite direction – slower and simpler rather than faster and more feature-rich. Storage management will disappear – reliability, versioning and search performance already come built into the newer storage clouds. Assets will come with unlimited undo capability – every change can be undone. Thin provisioning and de-duplication married to tumbling costs per terabyte will make (and is already making) all this magic possible. There will still be some super-performance disk arrays for some applications but distributed storage, search and access is the way things will go.

Tapering off

The era of tapes is over.

Backup was a big part of corporate strategy. Tapes, their use, their movement, their rotation, people put lots of thought into it all. For three decades, corporate IT was all taped up; from those massive old noisy spools to the modern cigarette-pack versions.

Tapes survived on three key advantages – cost per byte, huge storage and portability. Storing data on tapes was really cheap, and they could be moved away from the original data. Optical was somewhat cheaper per byte and more portable, but the maximum capacity was one hundredth of a tape and thus never became practical for large storage arrays. However hard disk costs started dropping, capacities increasing a few years ago – and only portability was left.

What has really started putting the nail in the tape coffin is the requirement to store things for years. Tape is good as a backup for weeks or months – decades bring all kinds of other challenges – the tape may deteriorate, one piece of a set may get lost or damaged, the label may become unreadable and worst of all – you may not find a compatible drive to use for restoration a decade later.

With the fading of tapes will face the concept of backing up. Services like Facebook or Dropbox already automatic create multiple internal replicas across different storage pools. Storage providers provide automatic versioning and undelete protection – you undo any change and go back to any previous version; this will eventually be the norm. Storage reliability will become service provider responsibility – backups are headed the way of paper printouts.

Last words

So there are my four attempts at sticking my neck out. What does everyone else think?